related items
Vic Chesnutt experiences moments of epiphany like you and I eat breakfast. Here's one from 1993, and a chance encounter with the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg when the two were performing at the same club.
"'Your new album is called Drunk.' And I said, 'Yes.'"
"'You recorded it when you were drunk.' And I said, 'Yes.'"
"And he says to me, 'Well, you're an idiot.'
"And I'm, like, what... what... what about, 'the best minds of my generation ...?" Chesnutt says, summoning the opening lines of Ginsberg's epic poem, Howl, depicting a world of angel-headed hipsters "starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the angry streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix."
Yeah, those words could be Chesnutt's, if he weren't so eloquent in his own right. Joining Jonathan Richman Friday at the Bug Jar, Chesnutt is one of those virtually invisible singer-songwriters who nevertheless is hailed as a national treasure by his bigger-name peers: Richman, Madonna, Smashing Pumpkins, Rickie Lee Jones, the Cowboy Junkies, Bob Mould, Bill Frisell, Van Dyke Parks, Wim Winders. He loves the southern intellectuals, now-dead writer acquaintances such as James Dickey and Larry Brown. "I'm super good at falling into things," Chesnutt says. "Wandering through the universe and bumping into people."
R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe was once such collision, taking it upon himself to add another one of those moments of epiphany at Chesnutt's house one day. In a fit of anger at Chesnutt's taste for abuse of substances, both controlled and uncontrolled, Stipe dumped him from his wheelchair. "That helped wake me up, that was a little wake-up call, for sure," Chesnutt says. "Another piece in the war of attrition against my self-destructive tendencies."
Chesnutt is an outspoken advocate for medical marijuana. "I do use it for pain management, sometimes, after I've had surgery, or for nausea control," says Chesnutt, who remains a wheelchair-bound paraplegic since his car accident at age 18. "But really, I love it. It's a beautiful thing. Human beings have been doing it for thousands of years."
"I had fun and all and the giggles as a teenager, and great insight into the world as a teenager. But I'm sure it affected my brain chemistry.
"But I don't think that's the story of my creative life," Chesnutt insists. "Unlike a lot of creative artists, where that is the lens they see the world through, my self-destructive nature was more as performance handicap. My interaction with the world onstage.
"I may write songs when I was drunk or high or whatever, and for some people, that's all they see themselves as. But that is not all I was interested in aesthetically. My songs are dark, but they're not about liquor or drugs."
How many songs has he written while high?
"Forty-five percent written while stoned?" Chesnutt muses. "Fifty percent, maybe? All of my songs are touched by weed, whether I'm playing them stoned, sitting around thinking about them stoned. They're all edited by weed. It's a useful tool for writers. Sure, you can get hit by a car, it makes you a dumbass, it gives you tunnel vision. But sometimes, that's what writers need."
His wandering the universe, bumping into people, has led to a 1992 half-hour PBS documentary, Speed Racer: Welcome to the World of Vic Chesnutt, and a brief appearance in the film Sling Blade as a member of Dwight Yoakam's band. He lives in Athens, Ga., with his wife Tina and the Labradoodle Rocket, who loves for Chesnutt to throw the possum for him. "My life is just like everyone else's, just a little slower," he says.
This, it becomes painfully obvious, is the true lens for his music. "All of my songs are maybe informed by my underdog status," Chesnutt admits. Perhaps this drew Richman to Chesnutt. "Jonathan likes my political songs," Chesnutt says. "He is a truly Bohemian eccentric."
Richman, creator of classics like "I Was Dancing in a Lesbian Bar," writes rock songs with almost a childlike naiveté, to great effect. "Jonathan's the light, and I'm the dark," Chesnutt says. It's an odd pairing, but one they've put to work, with Richman producing Chesnutt's soon-to-be-released next album, Skitter on Takeoff.
"You know how a duck will bounce across the water as he's taking off?" Chesnutt says. "I do soar. It just takes me a while to get up."
